Lilith

NON-FICTION

LILITH

by LAUREN RAINE

    Lilith is the western shadow goddess. In biblical myth, Lilith was created with Adam, his first wife. Because she would not submit to him, she was banished from Eden, and fled into the wilderness. Like Aphrodite, Lilith holds the mystery of female eros: capricious, creative, dangerous. Aphrodite made the Greeks uncomfortable, but they nevertheless honored her - not so in the monotheistic traditions we have inherited. So dangerous, in fact, was Lilith to patriarchal thinking that She was demonized. The rabbinical word for "whore" and "harlot" is derived from words that once meant "priestess".....in the language of myth, no Goddess was scapegoated more than Lilith, despised as "the great whore".

            Originally a Sumerian deity, the owl is Her totem, and Lilith is shown with black wings. Cast into the wilderness of our collective unconscious, Lilith the unsubmitted became the succubus, the predatory bird, the siren, the vampire, the promiscuous harlot. Consigned to the borderlands, She became the eater of children instead of the blessed midwife who births at midnight.

        The Goddess who became a Demon is not only misunderstood, She is a great teacher. Lilith is all the things we are most terrified of: the fire of erotic desire, the ferocity of our free, creative urges for self expression, and the rage of a world out of balance. Repression can mask psychic energies, but they cannot eliminate them. Driven underground, they gain destructive "shadow" power. During the Inquisition, millions of women were killed by a hysterical sexual misogyny carried out in the name of God. Today, in Africa and the Middle East, thousands of girls are initiated into their womanhood by clitorectomies. In the United States, a violent rape happens every 5 minutes. The wound of Lilith, and Her rage, continues.

           To reclaim Lilith within is powerful work for any woman, or man. To find the face of Lilith is to find our faces before we became slaves. To remember a time when we walked fearless in the night, when we danced beneath the sun as co-creators with men, when our sexuality was our joy and not our shame, when our bodies were no less than the Body of the Goddess.

            At last, Lilith is rising.

LILITH

by LAUREN RAINE

We were innocent then.
Just little monkeys,
wandering a newly risen world,
it's empty waters and warm sun.

Before the words, and shapes
and endless dividing of things.
Naming and breaking,
each piece
smaller and harder,
denser and slower.
And colder.

You see, I was enraptured
by the huge ferocity of World
Her spiral mysteries
Stars reflected in dark tidepools,
vines that curled eager tendrils
around the curious finger,
hyacinth and hyena calling across the night

But Adam wanted
to control the uncontrollable:
I was his first attempt.
Not for any price.....not for bread,
ease or Eden
would I be anything less
than what I am.

So I grew wings and flew away

While Adam
invented punishment.
And made for himself a jealous God
who would have it no other way
And made of me a demon

Well, damned if I do and damned if I don't!